LibraryThing's Easy Tool for Showing Off Your Book Projects

LibraryThing is a fun tool for keeping track of and categorizing the contents of your personal library. But it also allows users to generate code for LibraryThing widgets for their blogs and web sites.

Go to the Widget section of the LibraryThing web site to read about them.

A good while back, I used the the "LibraryThing Blog Widget" to create a rotating mini showcase of the books I've copyedited over the years. I placed it in the sidebar of this blog. But the really exciting use for it didn't occur to me until just this week: I also placed a book widget on the main Projects page of my business web site. I used the "Advanced options" link on the widget-creation page at LibraryThing to tweak the colors and type used in the widget for my web site. I really like it on the Projects page because it's something visual amid all the text there and so it brings to life the lists of clients there. I don't want visitors to my site put to sleep by too much text.

When you're filling out the LibraryThing form in preparation for generating the HTML for the widget that you will eventually paste into your web site's or blog's HTML, you can narrow down what books will be shown by choosing the tags you've used on LibraryThing to group your books together. I chose the tag "copyedited by KOK Edit" so that only books with that tag, and not also the ones that I've read for pleasure or that I use as reference works, appear in my widgets. If you're a proofreader, you might use the tag "proofread by Josef Detailoriented"; if you're an indexer, "indexed by Marina del Category"; if you're a designer of book covers and/or book interiors, "cover [or interior] designed by Vanessa Talent"; if you're an author, "written by Martin Scribner."

You see the possibilities?

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